Credit for all photos to Enoch Chuang, courtesy of Ethel Cain’s team
Live music is commonly compared to a religious experience, and the twelve thousand fans who flowed into Ethel Cain’s concerts at the Shrine Auditorium last week would probably agree that her shows are just about the most extreme version of live music that you’ll ever experience. The camo, denim, and vintage-clad crowd buzzed waiting for the show to start, and whether the source of that buzz was excitement to hear their favorite tracks live or nervousness as to whether their tear ducts could handle the night ahead of them is unknown. Speaking from experience, though, the pre-show jitters came from somewhere in between all of those feelings, and the show more than delivered. On her records, Ethel Cain, the alias for Florida-born singer-songwriter Hayden Anhedönia, is the whole package, but her music live is something otherworldly — a sunny Sunday sermon and a midnight cult gathering all at once that you simply have to see to believe. It was immediately evident that this hauntingly beautiful, century-old theater was the perfect sight for Cain’s performance to go down.
Three years ago, Ethel Cain made her mark on music history with her critically acclaimed debut album Preacher’s Daughter. Just three weeks ago, Cain, newly independent, finally shared the album’s long-awaited B-sides as part of a thematic prequel project titled Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You. The album more than lived up to the hype, managing to find the perfect blend between the devastating lyricism of Preacher’s Daughter and the haunting ambience of her latest experimental drone album Perverts. It’s been a long year for fans of Cain, an artist who’s been mired in constant controversy and even recently received the badge of honor that comes from being denounced by Fox News. Nevertheless, it’s albums and nights like these that remind us why we fell in love with her story in the first place and why we’re still here, thirsty for more all these years later despite the noise.
At eight o’clock, Toronto shoegaze band 9Million took the stage with frontman Matthew Tomasi describing the Shrine as “one of the coolest venues I’ve ever seen.” While the group’s vocals couldn’t quite manage to fill up such a large space, their instrumentation more than made up for it with killer drumming and a mesmerizing row of members playing guitar riffs in sync. There’s something irresistibly charming about watching a group of friends jam out with each other with as much joy as 9Million does. “Thanks for partying with us. Everybody scream and smoke weed,” said Tomasi before they played the final song of their set and left Cain’s fans to mentally prepare for what lay in store for them.
Later that night, Cain was met with rapturous applause as she emerged through the stage’s foggy swampland overlay. She soaked in the ambience of “Willoughby’s Theme” before taking her place behind the central Christian cross mic-stand for “Janie.” Willoughby Tucker’s singles followed, starting with the ‘80s synths and timeless girlhood envy of “Fuck Me Eyes” as Cain empathetically observed, “She’s just tryna feel good right now.” Next came the cinematic road-trip of “Nettles,” the crowd hanging on her every word as she told the devastatingly romantic teenage love story revolving around the album’s titular character. Cain’s musical journey is ripe with this kind of extensive fictional lore, but with a voice as consistently clear as hers, nearly any unsuspecting individual could follow along with her storytelling almost as well as her most dedicated fans.
On last year’s Childish Behaviour Tour, Cain played the then unreleased “Dust Bowl.” At the time, the song was only known by the few who had sought out the demo on Soundcloud. Now, with a proper home on Willoughby Tucker, “Dust Bowl” has become an immediate fan favorite with the standout moment from the tour being the lines “Grew up hard, fell off harder / Cooking our brains, smoking that shit your daddy smoked in Vietnam” and the subsequent blinding beat drop. The song perfectly bridged Cain’s story of romance and regret, bleeding into the set’s increasingly darker tone emphasized by the hypnotizing, atmospheric run of “Vacillator,” “Onanist,” “A Knock At The Door,” “Radio Towers,” and “Tempest.” Viewable from behind the large cross on center stage, Cain’s figure delivered what could only be described as a siren song medley. The highlight of the night was undoubtedly the album’s closer, “Waco, Texas.” On the record, the song is a fifteen-minute trance that you wish could go on forever, and its live version was no exception. You could sense that many tears were shed as the weight of the song’s emotion took its time building up to a cathartic release, a show-stopping high note that made even the security guards applaud in awe.
Cain soon returned to the stage to chants of her name, kicking the encore off with the song that started Willoughby Tucker’s story and what many would consider her magnum opus: “A House In Nebraska.” It’s the ultimate “right person, wrong time” soundtrack, and nothing could beat feeling those deep piano chords in my bones when Cain signaled for the crowd to scream their aching hearts out at the lines “And it hurts to miss you, but it’s worse to know / That I’m the reason you won’t come home.” While Cain’s discography is filled with these Southern gothic ballads, her two setlist mainstays never fail to bring the tear-stained crowd to their feet, jumping up and down to cherish the show’s final few moments. She described Inbred hit “Crush” as fun and stupid before stepping away from the cross in favor of leaning into the pit and getting up close and personal with its many outreached hands. As the song came to an end, she gestured to the audience, “‘Cause good men die too, so I’d rather be with you.” Of course, no Ethel Cain concert is complete without a rendition of “American Teenager” which she began by euphorically belting, “Don’t stop believin’” in reference to the Journey song she samples on the hit. As the opening notes played, it struck me that this was likely my last time hearing the song live as an American teenager myself, and I proceeded to sing my heart out in honor of my high school self who loved and leaned on this song more than anything.
I was initially hesitant to attend Cain’s concert so soon after the release of Willoughby Tucker, but after experiencing the show, it’s become clear that this was an album crafted to be heard and processed with not only Cain herself, but the thousands of other fans whose shared loneliness and yearning has led them to her life-saving music. For three hours, we got to stop watching the news and sit in our collective sadness, anger, and hope for the world. God might not save us, but maybe a night with Ethel Cain can.
Listen to Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You below!
